Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday August 31, 2013 @09:35AM
from the every-use-of-weapons-is-a-defining-moment-for-the-targets dept.

Lasrick writes "Oliver Meier describes the long-term significance (even beyond the incredible human suffering) of Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons on August 21, and outlines six major steps for response. Quoting: 'The attack in August is a historic event with wider implications. Its impact on the role of chemical weapons in international security in general will depend primarily on the responses. Looking beyond the current crisis, failure to respond to the attacks could undermine the taboo against chemical weapons. ... First, a unified response by the international community is essential. The strength of international norms depends primarily on great-power support. So far, such a unified response is sorely lacking. Judgments about how to react to the use of chemical weapons appear to be tainted by preferences about the shape of a post-war Syria. This has already damaged the international chemical weapons legal regime.'"

I thought depleted uranium was used for its mass, not specifically for its long-term toxic effects. Lead is toxic also, after all. And white phosphorus just burns you up faster than conventional incendiaries, what’s the problem there? It’s preferable for people to burn more slowly?

I thought depleted uranium was used for its mass, not specifically for its long-term toxic effects. Lead is toxic also, after all. And white phosphorus just burns you up faster than conventional incendiaries, what’s the problem there? It’s preferable for people to burn more slowly?

The problem with white phosphorus is that it doesn't kill people, it maims them. The overall gist of the rules of war is that it's OK to kill people but not to leave them suffering. It's tantamount to torture or terrorism, using fear and pain rather than force to achieve your goals. Ostensibly killing soldiers is part of a just war (making them stop doing whatever it is that justifies your war), while simply scaring people isn't, even though it leaves them alive.

It took me a long time to write that in as neutral a fashion as I could. I'm sure that a great many people would find it a silly distinction. But it really is a key underlying principle for why we have rules of war at all. I personally find the concept kind of odd.

Think about a conscript. His country is at war because of his politicians. His personal beliefs don't matter. He either fights or he, at best, is in jail. Remember the kids who went to Canada instead of being drafted to fight in Vietnam?

So the least that the professional soldiers and responsible politicians can do is to make basic rules so that that kid can get back to his pre-war life with as much of his body still intact as possible.

Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill. But they do tear up lungs and eyes and nervous systems. So the casualties may be able to move themselves but they cannot pick up their old lives again.

Now imagine the impact that has on a country AFTER the war. Thousands and thousands of disabled citizens that have trouble working.

Nuclear weapons also just "burn" people. They are not used specifically for their fallout either. What's the problem?

The problem is that nuclear weapons cause too much "collateral damage". As in, not only did the military base cease to exist, but the hospital and schools around it are gone, too. Don't forget the orphanage, the retirement home, and the church/synagogue/mosque/etc.

Genghis Khan understood war. You don't. Enjoy your time in the play pen of life. War is war, there are no fucking rules. If the liberals in the west understood that, the middle east would be civilized by now. Grow up.

I always harken back to the quote from William Tecumseh Sherman: "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

Of course, he also said, "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."

Sherman understood this which is why he and his army burned, raped and looted through Georgia. He intended to drive home the message that "war is hell" to the people who supported and provided the opposing army with supplies. To hear people whine today about the unintentional collateral damage occurring is perplexing. War is hell and the end result is death and devastation. It is best to avoid war if at all possible and if not then do whatever it takes to win. After all, the winners get to write the hi

Unless you're eating the depleted uranium, you probably aren't going to be affected by it. Skin is pretty good at stopping alpha and relatively good at stopping beta radiation (like that stuff you get from the sun). Stomach linings and lungs are not.

White Phosphorus is actually not specifically banned in any treaty except for use against civilian targets. It is used extensively in signaling (i.e. flares), tracer rounds, and to produce large amounts of smoke.

Unless you're eating the depleted uranium, you probably aren't going to be affected by it.

Or breathing it.

"In military conflicts involving DU munitions, the major concern is inhalation of DU particles in aerosols arising from the impacts of DU-enhanced projectiles with their targets. When depleted uranium munitions penetrate armor or burn, they create depleted uranium oxides in the form of dust that can be inhaled or contaminate wounds. The Institute of Nuclear Technology-Radiation Protection of Attiki,

Are you being deliberately obtuse or are you just that ignorant? Depleted Uranium is by no stretch of the imagination a chemical weapon and the use of white phosphorus against a human target is a war crime in its own right.

The problem with chemical weapons (Lets call them "War Gasses" to avoid confusion,) is that they are not really effective against a military target. (They can degrade a military unit's effectiveness, but both sides get degraded.) They are, however, wonderfully effective against civili

White phosphorous (WP) is a chemical that burns very hot, very bright, and produces a lot of smoke. This gives WP a number of military uses including incendiary, illumination, and creating smoke screens.

There is nothing illegal about using WP for illumination or smoke screens. In fact it is quite common. In fact it is not even illegal to use it as an incendiary. What is illegal is to use any incendiary on a civilian centre.

It is illegal to use incendiary (fire causing) weapons in urban areas, so no napalm, WP, petroleum jelly, or equivalents. This is because incendiary weapons start fires which kill indiscriminately and can easily create fires too large for firefighting efforts to control. The firebombing of Tokyo (100,000 dead) and Hamburg (42,000 dead) are examples of using incendiary weapons in an urban area on a large scale.

The problem is that the media dumbs everything down to WP == incendiary == war crime. Which is like claiming laser guided bombs = lasers = blinding = war crime. Next time you see someone in the media talking about WP war crimes take a look at the evidence. If the WP didn't start a fire it wasn't being used an an incendiary.

For good is a very subjective way to say that. I'm sure the fellow humans that are affected with such things would disagree with you, regardless if they hold US citizenship or not. I guess this is how the British justified the atrocities done by the "empire" while its educated citizens thought it was completely alright.

And for what it's worth, some of the UN research team members are starting to say there is a clear indication that it was the rebels, not the government who did it. In any case, there would b

Depleted uranium is used because of its pyrophoric properties (in addition to high density). No explosives are needed for it to explode when hitting target. But it is toxic and radioactive crap that causes cancers and birth effects. When oxided, it quickly finds its way to ground water, poisons and irradiates local population for a long time. Just check how Falujah suvrivors are doing these days: 12-fold increase in child cancers, lots of other symptoms remarkably similar to those in Hiroshima. Depleted ura

12-fold increase in child cancers, lots of other symptoms remarkably similar to those in Hiroshima

Any population would exhibit similar effects just from the increased medical scrutiny. Ie, if you start with a population for which no one is looking for such ailments, and then you start looking in great detail, you will find greatly increased numbers of those ailments. Observation bias is a powerful thing.

People that lead others simply because they are born into a family that has control.People that kill others just because they don't believe the same crazy shit.People that think they are better than others because of money or political power.With so much better things to do why is the world is still fucken nuts !

It's because chemical weapons are only effective against civilian populations. Any well trained military unit will be trained and equipped to deal with them. But it's a horrific way for dictators like assad and hussein to punish unruly subjects.

It is the scale.Chemical weapons can be taken by the wind and dispersed miles and miles away in any random direction. Killing and maiming everything in their path. And can get into water supplies, and poison stuff for generations.tactical missiles and grenades will kill indiscriminately for a few meter radius, and as soon as they explode they are not not any more dangerous or bad for the environment than a few plastic cups strewn around.

It is indeed a very complex issue to which there is no easy one line answers. But there is a sort of logic behind why some weapon systems are banned, and others not, or how even legal weapons can be used in an illegal way.

It is not about some weapons being good or bad, or even the amount of suffering they cause at the individuals affected by them. It is all about keeping military actions under control causing the least amount of suffering among soldiers and civilians in relation to the objectives of the mil

weapons that deliver a chemical reaction causing bits of metal flying through your eye, skin and lung are good.

It's only in American you'll hear someone say that weapons are good.

Also conventional weapons are not allowed to kill indiscriminately either... They are not allowed to be dangerous generations later, i.e. mines forbidden.
You'll also find that most responsible countries are taking steps towards forbidding cluster munition:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions

Any use of war weapons is a terrible thing; usually the people that demand the weapons' use or make light of it are those who have never been on a battlefield.

That having been said: There are different types and degrees of injury potentially caused by weapons of war (or any weapon); these injuries may be classified by type and degree of acute trauma as well as by long-term, chronic sequelae. Whereas in my opinion the horror of a -fatal- injury from weapons of war cannot really be differentiated or mitigate

Given all the lousy things the Obama administration has done, and yet Obama's approval rating remains high, I don't think there's anything he could do to create outrage. In that way he's a lot like Reagan, the 'teflon president,' because no matter how many scandals they went through, people don't seem to care.

The sad thing is that there's so much to criticize in this administration's foreign policy (e.g. illegal wars in Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, parts of Africa and the destabilization these wars cause, scandalous spying on our allies, etc.). The problem is that, with exceedingly few exceptions, prominent Republicans have no credibility to criticize the President on these issues. If anything, the old Republican establishment's complaint tends to be that the President was not aggressive enough in involving us in illegal wars. Because of this, they like their former presidential nominee have to inflate or even fabricate scandals (see the so-called apology tour in Egypt or the return of the Churchill bust).

I say this as a lifelong Republican: the GOP is currently dominated by short-sighted fools who are completely out of touch with the people, with what it means to govern, and with the real costs of violence. They've forgotten what it means to defend the Constitution, the country, and the people. They recall well, however, the support they receive as faithful supporters of the Military-Congressional-Industrial Complex. Therefore, when the same complaints can be made against Obama (and they can--he was a real coup for the MCI Complex, whether or not the administration sees it in their interests to define a coup), there's no opposition with the credibility to make them.

Well, if Bush does it, then it must be ok. I however can't help but not a key difference between those attacks [policymic.com] and Benghazi. Namely, that those attacks were much smaller in scale, were over quickly, and for which the US has considerable local protection.

For example, the most similar of the Bush-era attacks involved five gunmen breaking into the consulate [theguardian.com] at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and were quickly counterattacked by Saudi "security forces". The Benghazi consulate attacks reported involved hundreds of attackers with no support for US staff from local authorities for about seven hours. And that outcome turned out as uneventful as it did, because someone in Tripoli apparently decided on their own initiative to commandeer an airplane and fly into Benghazi and organize a rescue effort.

Afterward, the Obama administration took it upon itself to blame the Benghazi attacks on a rather offensive YouTube video, but one nobody had heard of before. That was probably because the attacks occurred before the upcoming November elections in the US.

So what makes Benghazi special is the weak tactical situation, the large scale of the attack, and most importantly, the tepid and politically self-serving response of the Obama administration to the attack.

Stop re-writing history. That YouTube video was well known before the attacks, and was the cause of the riots which the attackers used as cover. It wasn't that long ago. Do you really think we've all forgotten?

;
Note he said "usually". And note you give examples that are almost 70 years old. Who's been carpet bombing population centers since? Only example, I know of was during the Vietnam war (technically the Second Indochina War), but that turned out less effective than guided bombs.

With due respect, I think the reason why there hasn't been a carpet bombed city is mainly because the advanced industrial nations have avoided direct confrontations between each other, and that the weapon of choice in such a situation is currently a thermonuclear bomb. Guided bombs are useful if you want to keep the wars "limited" and going after weak nations that thumb their nose at the larger countries.

If a major wars erupts between major military powers, I would say all bets are off. The interesting th

Dresden and Tokyo are an example of "don't start nothing, wont be nothing". The Blitz, the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam, the Rape of Nanking.

Germany and Japan both committed such horrendous war crimes that the rapid destruction of the control those nation states had over their military forces took priority over some of the usual niceties of war.

It matters little who started what. Dresden remains an example of moral and practical failure. The moral failure came in the form of the massive civilian casualties knowingly inflicted. (That military men are guilty of atrocities does not mean unarmed non-combatants deserve punishment for those atrocities.)

The practical failure is often ignored, however, and the British should have been well aware of it. The Germans bombed London for months, operating under the belief that attacking the city would break the civilian will to fight. It turned out that attacking civilian populations only increases their will to fight, increases enlistment of willing soldiers beyond anything conscription can do, and makes any suggestion of acquiescence a political impossibility for those attacked. If you defeat an enemy military in the field, civilian support for the war effort will wane. Yet you cannot easily secure a surrender once you've committed atrocities against civilians.

This is directly comparable to the treatment of POWs. Some Germans were told by their fathers who'd fought in WWI to fight bravely even to the death against Russians but surrender to the first Americans you find. They said this because American had a policy of treating POWs humanely in WWI. Thus, American units in the European front could sometimes welcome a reduction in the fighting strength of the Germans due to surrender--an option which is always preferable because those who surrender do not shoot back. Contrast this with Americans after the Bataan Death March or, better still, Soviet defectors early in the war. Many Ukranians welcomed the Nazis, thinking them liberators from the evils of Stalin. They soon learned that the racist bastards could be even worse than Stalin. Consequently, Soviet soldiers fought for the state more fervently and many would refuse to surrender, knowing that death in battle would be preferable to being a Slavic POW in Nazi hands.

Atrocity can seem to give the one who commits it a brief surge of power, partly because of the fear it inflicts. But in the long run, atrocity and the killing of civilians is always counter-productive to a war effort. For more information, see Section V of this monograph [amazon.com].

Second: Bombs that unleash pieces of metal are usually used for specific targets not large populations.

Coventry, London, Berlin, most German industrial cities, virtually EVERY city in Japan other than the five set aside as potential A-Bomb targets (yeah, we put Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among others, on a NO-BOMB list, so we could evaluate the effects of the a-bomb without having to account for the effects of previous bombings).

Don't have boots on the ground. Don't have long term commitment. Go in hard and fast with airstrikes, missiles and other things aimed squarely at Assad's military forces. Tanks. Aircraft. Military bases. Military communications. Command centers. Artillery pieces and missile batteries. Anything that is a military target and can be taken out without civilian casualties. (with the precision strike capability the US has these days from drones etc, taking out even something as small as a tank without civilian ca

And what if the Syrian rebels were using those chemical weapons? The US government seems unwilling to investigate that option, even unwilling to let the UN investigate this. They have only one prefered outcome. Judging from Kerry's speech they don't even to bother to produce fake evidence like in Iraq.

You're NOT supposed to be the worlds police force. Especially not when there seems to be no proof Assad used those weapons. Kerry's speach was even worse than that of Colin Powell about WMD in Iraq, at least Powell tried to show the falsified "evidence".

Everyone outside the US, and some Americans too, understand that attacking Syria has much to do with oil, pipelines, Israel and scoring orders for American companies who donate to election campaigns. It has nothing to do with moral standards.

If we stay out, then all the other nations will be pissed at us because the U.S. is expected to be the police force of the world and we are expected to spend our money, troops and resources to fix everybody else's problems.

They won't (well, except for rebels in Syria).

Just look at the polls. The majority of people in UK and France are against participating in any military action against Syria. UK Parliament has just voted to not participate. Heck, even Syria's immediate neighbors are not all too happy about any potential strikes.

If we make war clean and tidy then where is the motivation to avoid it? The Star Trek episode, "A Taste of Armegeddon" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon) portrays two planets who've been at war for centuries. It was really "modern" where planets would launch simulated attacks which caused no collateral damage and computers would calculate the death toll. "Victims" were then calculated and selected via lottery. They'd report to the disintegrators for a painless death. It was so "humane" that the planets never had any motivation to end the war.

My point is that we should allow anything in war with the knowledge that the more horrific the weapon the more prompt and determined the response to it by the rest of the world.

The point is not to eliminate violence, only to organize it to serve the interest of the empire. Violence is a powerful too that can be used to justify all sorts of horrors in order to stop it. The US and the CIA lit the fuse, now they're going there to put out the fire.

The first machine guns were thought to be so awful that they would act as peace-preservers." [wikipedia.org] That didn't work out so well. It might seem ironic trying to impose rules in warfare, but anything that can lessen the damages should be encouraged.

I know hippies hate the mutually assured destruction idea... but it works. When in history have two empires struggling for more global power stood nose to nose with such little violence as with the USA and USSR? If you have more to lose than gain, even if you 'win', your perspective changes and you take a step back, or at least won't step into the fight. There is a line where we would be willing to step into a bar fight. There's a line much farther away (probably along the lines of someone attacking you first) that would need to be crossed to get us in a fight with someone with a knife in hand, even if we have a knife of our own. Most people/nations aren't completely irrational and operate off of general survival instincts.

um, you do know the USA and USSR just moved the violence and destruction to other countries right? Perhaps the world would have been better off for the last 70 years if they just took it out on each other and not played their stupidity out on the world stage.

General Patton actually made a good case for continued war near what would be the end of WWII. He wanted to keep moving the West's forces east and take Stalin down. He knew that if they stopped where they did (where the politicians wanted) we would get a more dangerous set of conditions. We had the nukes and the armies and production capability and the technology to do it. But they fired (and some say assassinated) him to keep him from pushing that position. If we had done that, we would not have had a col

If we make war clean and tidy then where is the motivation to avoid it?

Let's take this the other way. We could make wars deliberately ugly and high cost. But why would we think that would provide enough incentive to keep people from fighting them?

My view is that the only genuine way to prevent most war (between identifiable foes, that is) is to have a military force that will clobber anyone who starts such a fight. Change the strategic outcome of starting a war to always lose, and you end the incentive to engage in war.

When war is excused, for any reason, it is a sign that civilization is failing.

One of the more concrete ways war is "not excused" is by militarily defeating those who do initiate wars. As the previous poster noted, the Rwanda genocide was excused by the outside world for a considerable time until at least half a million people had died. It was only stopped when the concurrent Rwandan civil war ended with defeat of the side engaged in genocide.

"On March 17, 2003, Lord Goldsmith, Attorney General of the UK, set out his government's legal justification for an invasion of Iraq. He said that Security Council resolution 678 authorised force against Iraq, which was suspended but not terminated by resolution 687, which imposed continuing obligations on Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. A material breach of resolution 687 would revive the authority to use force under resolution 678. In resolution 1441 the Security Council determined that Iraq was in material breach of resolution 687 because it had not fully carried out its obligations to disarm. Although resolution 1441 had given Iraq a final chance to comply, UK Attorney General Goldsmith wrote "it is plain that Iraq has failed so to comply"."
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Legal_justification [wikipedia.org]

I for one do not trust our governments to tell me the truth, or engage in wars unless necessary anymore.

There has never been a treaty, or International Law, that says there must be a military response by otherwise uninvolved nations whenever there is a chemical weapons attack. This should be handled just like any other war crime. Someday we will get you, and we will put you on trial. We're not going to launch a weak-ass cruise missile campaign that will last for a measly two days and accomplish nothing but unnecessary civilian casualties.

People aren't dumb. What's going on in Syria sucks. Our involvement will not make things better.

Or maybe he seriously doubts that there would be any retaliation. Seriously, the USA looks like a bully that's finally been called on their bluffing. That and he's probably smart enough to know that the USA has no ulterior motive to go in and they really don't do anything that they think won't help them in the long run.

The US doesn't have the support that it had for the Iraqi invasion. Whatever else you can say about G. W. Bush, he at least was able to get a lot of support for his invasions and keep those who didn't from interfering. Obama can't even get the UK on board.

And Russia and China both oppose any military intervention, Russia to the point of sending military support for Assad such as anti-air missile systems [upi.com] which aren't any good against rebel forces, but would be of some use against air strikes by the US.

Not that I completely disagree with the sentiment expressed in the article but all the wide-eyed outrage coming from the government of the US of A is a tad laughable seeing how it's the only country in the history of humankind that's pounded other countries with both nuclear (see Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and chemical (see Agent Orange, Vietnam) weapons.

Not that I completely disagree with the sentiment expressed in the article but all the wide-eyed outrage coming from the government of the US of A is a tad laughable seeing how it's the only country in the history of humankind that's pounded other countries with both nuclear (see Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and chemical (see Agent Orange, Vietnam) weapons.

It's the only country to use nukes. But it certainly isn't the only to use gas. France, Germany and the UK all used it during the first world war. While Agent Orange was a gas, it was not believed to be toxic to humans At the time it was used in Vietnam. It was a defoliant used so the North Vietnamese troops couldn't hide under the forest canopy. Unfortunately Monsanto tainted it in production.

I take your point about other countries using chemical weapons. But:
1 - I meant that the US of A was the only nation to use both nuclear and chemical weapons
2 - Agent Orange wasn't just a defoliant. This quote is from the Agent Orange wikipedia article: "Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects as a result of its use"

There was an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro ("Attack without UN approval illegal"). I read a re-post of it in Stars & Stripes (Digital Edition, Main Edition, August 30, page 12). I cannot find a direct link to the Post and S&S uses flash, so you will have to dig it out yourself. It is worth reading.

This is not a defining moment any more than Iraq vs Iran in the 80s, than the USSR in Afghanistan, than the US in Vietnam, etc.

War is hell. Someday if your country is in a brutal fight to the death, you may also insist that your country use them. Honestly, if you want to stop Assad, then stop Assad, but don't try to pretend it's some moral imperative based on chemical weapons.

Russia, for example, does not dispute that chemical weapons were used, or that it was bad. They do dispute that there is any credible evidence linking the chemical weapons to the Syrian government. The attacks might also have been terrorist in nature, or even worse been perpetrated in a false flag manner to intentionally start a war. What is truly newsworthy about these events is how fast the US wants to move on Syria.

We don't even know that Assad did it. Given that we know that the rebels have sarin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXzyS9eUVgs), this could be a false flag. And yet the post reads like it's a foregone conclusion that Assad did it.

It's not, it was retracted as a hoax, and now is only peddled by people who have nothing better to do with their time. If you read the email 'plan,' it sounds like something a 20 year old college student would write, not a defense contractor